Comment by soulofmischief | Hacker News Reader

Comment by soulofmischief | Hacker News Reader

This post smells of LLM throughout. Not just the structure (many headings, bullet lists), but the phrasing as well. A few obvious examples:

- no special framework. No library buy-in. Just a URL

- Advance clock. Fire callbacks. Capture. Repeat. Every frame is deterministic, every time.

- We render dozens of frames that nobody will ever see, just to keep Chrome's compositor from going stale.

- The fundamental insight that you could monkey-patch browser time APIs ... is genuinely clever

- Where we diverged

The whole post is like this, but these examples stand out immediately. We haven't quite collectively put a name on this style of writing yet, but anyone who uses these tools daily knows how to spot it immediately.

I'm okay with using LLMs as editors and even drafters, but it's a sign of laziness and carelessness when your entire post feels written by an LLM and the voice isn't your own.

It feels inauthentic and companies like replit should consider the impact on their brand before just letting people write these kind of phoned-in blog posts. Especially after the catastrophe that was the Cloudflare Matrix incident (which they later "edited" and never owned up to).

And the lede is buried at the very end: This is just a vibe-coded modification of https://github.com/Vinlic/WebVideoCreator, and instead of making their changes open source since they're "standing on the shoulders of giants", the modifications are now proprietary.

In the end, being an AI company is no excuse for bad writing.

Their whole product is about vibe-coding unmaintainable "apps", not surprised they put the same level of (dis)attention in their blog too.

Also yikes for the proprietary modifications. AI companies: "what's yours is mine, and what's mine is mine only"

Unfortunately, people seem to organically love this sort of writing, since at least one or two of these get to near the top half of the front page here every day.

I'm not even against using AI per se, but when something is obviously written in ChatGPTese I'm not going to read it if I don't have to.

Yes, this kind of writing is rampant on X. Once you know it's coming from an LLM (mostly ChatGPT in my opinion as it uses this style often) you can't unsee it. And that immediately makes me skip it.

> - We render dozens of frames that nobody will ever see, just to keep Chrome's compositor from going stale

what's the issue with this one? it sounds like something I might write, tbh.

I don't have an issue with any particular form of writing, it's just that the current generation of LLMs often write this way and it's an indicator of possible LLM use.

"We X, just to keep Y from Z" and its variations are a pattern I've seen come up a lot.

You forgot the first part. the famous x,y, and z: "by virtualizing time itself, patching key browser audio APIs, and waging war against headless Chrome's quirks.

Yep, that's good one. "Virtualizing time itself" itself is such a dead giveaway. What a nonsensical phrase.

Virtual Time is a feature of Chrome to fast forward when rendering.

See --virtual-time-budget

https://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/

Yes, but "virtualizing time itself" as phrased is meant to be superfluous, LLMs do that kind of thing a lot. It makes it sound like some kind of mystical or novel approach even though the actual pattern is already common knowledge / explicitly supported.

Yeah it does have that flowery turn of phrase.

Lesson: if your going to do LLM assisted writing, say to it “make sure this has a distinct tone that consistent and clearly quite different”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isocolon#Tricolon

Thanks, it's helpful to put a name to it.

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